Elizabeth Joyce

​Introduction: Materiality and Poetry

This cluster is titled “Materiality” in an effort to distinguish it from the way that “Materialism” is linked to Marxist thought, that view of history whereby human activity is considered in terms of social class and productivity and perceived through the ideological perspective of the value of capital and status. Marxist historical materialism considers history in terms of stages of economic development. Key, in thinking about Materialism and Marxism, is the necessity to have a knowledge of history in order to understand the function of ideology in current social and cultural institutions.

Materiality is, rather, the notion that everything that people are conscious of, including thoughts and ideas, is material. So, instead of viewing materials in terms of their value, whether social, cultural or economic, the materialist would contend that all experience, whether tangible or not, would have an essence. Much of what Materiality proposes, therefore, is to turn away from ontological conceptions that rely on binary divisions between human and nonhuman and between what is interior and exterior. This notion of existence has been apparent in philosophical approaches, such as Material Philosophy, Phenomenology, Process Philosophy (including attention to time), Material Culture and Vital Materialism, proponents of which use terms like enwebbed, (en)tangled, enmeshed, imbricated, and even mangle to explain how people and all that composes what is exterior and interior to them interacts with them in creating meaning, culture and social organization.

Those working, more or less, within the category of Material Philosophy include those in the fields of Material Culture, Material Anthropology, Sociomateriality and Realist Social Ontology. Material Culture, for instance, rather than dividing science into the study of the natural world, for greater understanding of the material, and the study of social organizations, for comprehension of people and their behaviors, unites these fields through the belief that social organization comes about through development, production and interaction with objects (Woodward). James Gaskin, Nicholas Berente, Kalle Lyytinen and Youngjin Yoo, see sociomateriality in terms of routines, patterns of interactions between people (the social element) and objects (the material element) that reinforce this entanglement between people and the material world.

Clearly linked conceptually to the sociomaterialist routines is Gilles Deleuze’s focus on repetitions with variations. Deleuze argues in Difference and Repetition that “repetition is the return of the differential genetic condition of real experience each time there is an individuation of a concrete entity…. The individuation of entities is produced by the actualization, integration, or resolution of a differentiated field of Ideas or ‘multiplicities’ that are themselves changed, via ‘counter-effectuation,’ in each individuating event” (Smith and Protevi). Simply put, people do similar things repeatedly, but each time, they do those things in a slightly different way. This is, for Deleuze, a repetition of difference. Tim Ingold, a material Anthropologist, calls this experience Taskscape, that when people perform repetitive acts, none of those acts are ever exactly the same. This multiplicity of repeated behaviors creates a field where the activity of human life occurs. There is no distinguishing between the individual and the act, the act and objects, or the individual and the objects. They are integral to each other in what Karen Barad calls, “iterative intra-activity” (106).

Coming out of this notion of repetition is the further argument by Deleuze and Felix Guattari concerning assemblage. For Deleuze and Guattari, the culminating entity of meaning is the assemblage, which is an ordered matrix of multiple “bodies,” items of matter. Philosophy’s task is to makes sense of these assemblage constructions; art’s task is to be conscious of them (Smith and Protevi). Manuel De Landa, a proponent of realist social ontology, appeals to these objective processes of assembly in terms of how social entities are concatenated into assemblages that are constructed through very specific historical processes.

Feminist theorists have seen materiality as a particularly fruitful approach to conceptions of being. These New Materialists (Barad) and Vital Materialists (Braidotti, Bennett) are concerned in particular with the anti-binary approach of materialism, but also with its perception that matter is not inert, but rather embued with energy. These theorists use spatial metaphors like mapping and cartography for this approach. In Nomadic Subjects, for instance, Rosi Braidotti talks about how “Figurations are not figurative ways of thinking, but rather materialistic mappings of situated, i.e., embedded and embodied, social positions” (4). Critical to vital material’s sense of energized matter is the notion that matter is a coming into being; it is not simply a state of energy but a becoming. Matter is, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin argue, “generative,” “a transformative force in itself,” and “simultaneously material and representational.” Because of this feature of Matter, as Barad argues, our understanding of existence is “entangled” with matter. “Knowing is,” she argues, a “cutting together-apart,” the cleaving, in both senses of the word, of the intermingling and intra-acting of elements of matter (Interview in Dolphijn and van der Tuin).

So, what does this have to do with poetry? Language, in this approach to conceptions of being, is as material as any other element of consciousness. Matter and language, according to Judith Butler, are “inextricably related” (Fraser 613).[1] One component of the “coming into being” of matter, is, therefore, embedded in language. Vicki Kirby, in Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large, argues that “matter appears as something that is not only spoken about or spoken with, but rather as itself simply speaking” (qtd. in Dolphijn and van der Tuin). Speaking, any language production, is, therefore, matter as much as anything else is. Poetry is matter, too, then, a “sounding” and a “diffraction.”

These considerations are apparent in various forms in the essays in this cluster on materiality. Certainly, the attention to and deliberation about history and the past are essential to the pieces by Mark Noble and Julie Brown. Noble attends to the “abstract materialism” of George Oppen’s poetry in arguing that modern poetry faces “a moment in which ontologicial queries about what links thought to its materials coincides with political requirements for a historical materialism adequate to the present.” The impact of this crisis is that the world of history and poetry are scaled too large and are too “volatile” for human access. The poem becomes the tool to negotiate between these scales and volatilities to support human scaling.

Considerations for the role of history in the material are as well present in Brown’s essay. In her discussion of Susan Howe’s poetry and Howe’s study of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Brown argues that the interleaf in Howe’s book The Midnight is the equivalent to Dickinson’s dash, a “hinge” between the present and the past that “persists” through material, marking at once the connection with and separation from the past and creating a “liminal space of possibility.” In her discussion of Jen Bervin’s quilts of Dickinson’s poems, Brown also argues that the quilt serves to materialize, literally and figuratively, the immaterial state of the poem.

Like Brown, Scarlett Higgins relates materiality to literal fabric in her discussion of Harryette Mullen’s poetry. Mullen, she argues, uses the “material objects associated with stereotypical femininity” in order to both valorize femininity and to call out social constraints on women. The “gifts” that Mullen lists to represent the stages of a girl’s life “become symbols for aspects of identity that are fully historical and contingent upon their cultural contexts.” So, too, the dropped negligée/shawl and neck ribbon of the poem on Manet’s Olympia signifies the courtesan, and Mullen suggests, racial identity.

Other work in this cluster focuses on dematerialization, the effort to step out of constraints of history and to exert political change. Daniel Morris, for instance, argues that Language poets, Barrett Watten, in particular, wielded various tools of abstraction to subvert historical positioning and “normative” politics. In so doing, these poets strove for an “opaque emancipation” so occluded that it cannot be adequately described. Andrew Levy’s poems take the same approach in arguing for dematerialization, a “de-bodying” to dodge the frenetic clutter and jangle of contemporary experience.

Katarina Luther takes up Alice Oswald’s poem Dart in order to apply Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage and Barad’s of diffraction. In her encyclopedic attention to the river Dart, Oswald makes the reading of the poem (or wreading, as Barad puts it) a “transmission of the river” so that the river becomes material, “constitut[ing] entangled objects, subjects, meanings, and words” into a “material reality.” My own contribution to the cluster takes up this notion of diffraction and adds Martin Heidegger’s concept of “sounding” to it in order to argue that through light and sound, Kenneth Goldsmith and Christian Bök materialize their poetry.

[1] It is much too complicated to go into in this small space, but please see Vicki Kirby’s “When All That is Solid Melts into Language: Judith Butler and the Question of Matter” (International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 7.4 (2002). Reprinted in Breen, Margaret Sönser (ed. and introd.); Blumenfeld, Warren J. (ed.); Butler Matters: Judith Butler's Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005, 41-56) for a complete explanation of problems with Butler’s approach.